Patriotism Trumps Graft in Ukraine’s Wartime Election

By Michael Winfrey, Kateryna Choursina and Daryna Krasnolutska  

War may have ended the era when Ukrainians traded their votes for some cooking oil and flour.
“I took the buckwheat but voted my heart,” reads an Internet meme of an elderly lady displaying a rude gesture on Twitter and Facebook from an Internet group called Our Guard. It’s urging voters not to exchange ballots for food before tomorrow’s general election.
Parties have abandoned the pop concerts and pomp that accompanied past campaigns after more than 3,800 deaths in Ukraine’s battle against pro-Russian separatists and earlier protests in Kiev. President Petro Poroshenko, Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk and
other contenders have instead signed military heroes and anti-graft activists to their voter lists.
They’re trying to counter the electorate’s increasing frustration with the conflict, an outlook for a 10 percent economic contraction this year and corruption that’s worse than Russia’s and tied with Nigeria’s, according to Transparency International’s corruption perception index.
Facing angry mobs who’ve beaten politicians, dumped others in garbage bins and defaced campaign posters, candidates now boast of donations to front-line troops fighting the rebels. For their part, voters are using the Internet to verify the pledges and scrutinize the histories of politicians who’ve failed to overhaul the former Soviet republic’s economy since the fall of the Iron Curtain.

War, Peace

“War and peace are dominating the Ukrainian agenda, as well as the economic situation and it’s making people depressed and angry,” said Volodymyr Zastava, an analyst at the Gorshenin Institute in Kiev, which focuses on democratic processes. “Ukrainians are turning into a political nation now. People are more demanding from politicians and will press them.”
Poroshenko’s pro-European party is set to win the election with about 30 percent support, followed by Oleh Lyashko’s Radical Party with 13 percent, according to a poll of Ukrainians who’ve decided who they’ll vote for. The survey by the Democratic Initiatives Fund and the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology had a margin of error of 2.2 percentage points.
Yatsenyuk’s People’s Front had 11 percent. Almost a third of the electorate hasn’t decided who to vote for yet, according to the Oct. 9-18 poll of 2,025 people.

Dumpster Justice

While government officials have urged voters to come to authorities with proof of vote buying, some Ukrainians are taking matters into their own hands over perceived graft.
Crowds have thrown more than a dozen candidates into dumpsters and doused some with paint this month. Demonstrators in September targeted lawmaker Vitaliy Zhuravskyi outside parliament and set fire to tires when the chamber delayed a vote on a law to prevent functionaries from former President Viktor Yanukovych’s government taking top government posts. Yanukovych’s former Party of Regions, which won 183 seats two years ago, is absent from the ballot.
Oleksandr Gorin, a People’s Front candidate in the Black Sea region of Odessa, was beaten by unknown people, the party said last week on its website. Another, Volodymyr Borysenko, survived gunfire and an explosive device, according to Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser at the Interior Ministry. Police are investigating whether the attacks are election-related.

Crisis Bites

Documentary film maker Mark Gres, who’s running for the Radical Party, was beaten and stabbed last week near his house in Kiev, the party said on its website. Political groups say more campaign staff have been attacked across Ukraine, with the People’s Front urging opponents to stop using violence.
This is the fourth parliamentary ballot since the 2004 Orange Revolution, which overturned a Yanukovych presidential election victory that year. The pro-Russian leader was elected in 2010 before pro-European demonstrators ousted him in February. Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula a month later and the separatist conflict broke out in the eastern Donetsk and Luhansk regions.
Rebels in control of regions in Donetsk and Luhansk have prevented the Central Electoral Commission from distributing ballots to 15 of the 32 regions there, meaning voting won’t take place, the commission said on its website today. Voting won’t take place in Crimea’s 12 districts either, it said, which will leave 37 of parliament’s 450 seats vacant.

Vote-Buying

The conflict has cast a pall over campaigning, and millionaire candidates have abandoned luring voters with huge pop concerts and style makeovers, such as when former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko transformed herself from a brunette gas executive to a peasant-braided icon who only wore white.
In an Oct. 1-18 poll of 2,025 people, 68 percent of respondents condemned the practice of selling votes, up from 53 percent in 2012 elections. The survey, by the Democratic Initiatives Fund and the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, had a margin of error of 2.2 percentage points.
Ukraine’s parliament adopted a law last week criminalizing vote selling and increasing punishments for those trying to buy support. Even so, attempts to buy votes are commonplace, with Interior Minister Arsen Avakov warning of an “avalanche” of cases that he urged Ukrainians to report.
The Electoral Commission said in a statement it had warned an independent candidate in the Chernihiv region north of Kiev after an opponent accused him of vote buying. The complaint alleged campaign workers were offering packages with cake, calendars, religious candles and prayerbooks for votes.

Star Wars

Olha Samofalova, a 66-year-old Kiev retiree, said a candidate in her district offered free trips to the Pochayevska Lavra abbey, a remote pilgrimage site 400 kilometers (250 miles) from Kiev that’s popular among Orthodox Ukrainians.
“I refused, because I see that as vote buying,” she said.
Some parties are engaging in other unorthodox tactics. The emergence of the Internet Party, led by Ukrainians who’ve changed their names to those of Star Wars-themed characters such as Stepan Chewbacca and Emperor Palpatine, has touched off a confusing array of copycats, with 12 Darth Vaders running in as many districts in Kiev.
In response, activists have created dozens of websites and social media groups, such as “Resistance,” which has tracked cases of attempted electoral fraud and vote buying. Another website, called “Word and Deed,” lists histories of candidates who supported Yanukovych.
“I was never so interested in politics before,” said Eugenia Tazetdinova, an unemployed 28-year-old who for the first time has read the biographies of candidates running in her constituency. “The war in the east and the death of so many people have prompted me to take my choice seriously.”